25
JULY 2005 ‚ 2145 HOURS ‚ SERENGETI NATIONAL PARK TANZANIA
I was just too damn tired to relate the experiences of yesterday, but I'm making
myself catch up tonight just so I don't get three days behind. Tonight's dispatch
is coming to you from a camp chair at a low camp table inside our tent at the
Turner Springs campground somewhere within the vastness that is the Serengeti
National Park. "Serengeti" is a Maasai word for "endless plains, which is a very
apt description for the huge land of which we're in the middle.
But before I cover how we got
here, I need to finish up business about our last night at the Kirurumu
Luxury Tented Lodge. If you'll recall, I closed my previous post with
mention of a Koran reading of some sort being boomed out over the loudspeakers
down at the mosque in Mosquito Creek. Well, it didn't stop. All night.
If it wasn't the Koran being read, it was some indecipherable exortation
that sounded as if it was demanding that any able Muslims or Mosquito
Creekians rise up, grab their machetes and take to the hills to slaughter
the capitalist pig infidels residing in the tents of inequity.
It finally stopped at five in
the morning. Needless to say I got at best a couple solid hours of
sleep, further hampered by the slight respiratory bug I got somewhere
along the way that had me coughing all night. Suffice it to say that
for as glorious as the accommodations and service were I will be writing
a letter to the lodge to let them know that they damn well better look
into figuring out someway to shut the natives up, because if they don't
I will never again spend a night near Lake Manyara, which we departed
yesterday morning, July 24, for what turned out to be mostly 80 some
odd miles of really bad road. I mean REALLY bad, rutted and washboarded
roadÖ all the way from the Ngorongoro Crater to the Serengeti National
Park and onward another 15 or so miles to the site of where our tented
camp is.
We arrived rattled but otherwise
intact for a late lunch and a brief respite before heading out for
a late-afternoon game drive. Though first we were marauded by tsetse
flies (and I was bitten on the elbow) we soon escaped the winged hoards
and found a variety of wildlife: buffalo, Grant's and Thomson's gazelles,
topi, hartebeast, wildebeast, zebra, baboon, a variety of vultures
and maribou stork, hippo, waterbuck ‚ we even found a leopard dozing
in a tree about a hundred yards from the road. Dinner back at camp
was fabulous, and being the only guests we have the entire place to
ourselves. Certainly it would be nice to have the opportunity to socialize
with other guests, but then again we might be saddled with idiots to
share these awesome evenings with, so I'm fine with the arrangement.
After dinner, with bats flitting
about overhead grabbing their evening meals, Susan and I held each
other and marveled not just at the outrageous amount of stars (and
being able to see the Scorpius Constellation in its entirety!), but
also in just the simple truth that we were standing in the dark of
night on the Serengeti.
Cause for applause, baby. Cause
for applause.
This morning was a bit more
leisurely with us rising for an 8:30 a.m. breakfast and hitting the
roads for a full day's game drive. Rather than come back to camp for
lunch, we chose to bring picnic boxes with us and had put in about
55 miles of driving ‚ with stops along the way to view elephants, giraffe,
cheetahs in the tall grass raising their heads up now and again from
a kill to show their bloodied jaws, wildebeast, gazelles, zebras and
warthogs and so much more. Though there were occasional skirmishes
with the tsetse flies (I got nipped again by one that had landed on
my wedding
band and probed my ring finger)
we were able to keep them at bay including when we pulled off the road under
a tree to have lunch and watch a bunch of vultures and maribou storks have
a bite of their own.
After lunch we found a small pool with one visible hippo and several freshwter
crocodiles. Then it was on through a small colony of vervet monkeys to the
napping place of a small pride of lions. The male, some 30 yards off was a
magnificent fellow who'd only be bother to raise his handsome head whenever
the vehicle was started and moved. Not more than 15 feet from us lay a totally
relaxed lioness with a healing but nasty scar running down her left haunch
who couldn't care less about us watching her from so short a distance.
Back
down through the tail end of the great wildebeast migration (there were thousands
of them all over the place) through zebra, gazelle, warthog, elephants,
more wildebeast, giraffe, secretary birds, crested eagles, until one of our
last stops was at the park's hippo pool. If
you ever want to see how small a space 120 hippos can be crammed into, look
no further than
this place ‚ and
I'm talking everything from huge hippos on
the perimeter to little tykes in the milddle. All of them just in hippo
heaven keeping cool in what certainly was water only a hippo could love.
So
of course some other visitor to the park has to sidle up next to where
Susan and I were standing and prove his closed-minded lameness by remarking
how disgusting
the hippos were to be wallowing in their own filth. Several
rebuttals came to mind from "Could you be more a typical ignoramus?" to "Are
they that much different from us?" But instead I just kept it lowkey
and suggested he keep an open mind." He didn't, so we left and moved to
another vantage point above the pool from where I could grab some more
pictures and video.
Last but not least
on the sprint home trying to beat the sunset we couldn't
help but stop at a spot that perhaps only a few minutes earlier had
hosted a lioness killing a zebra. Only instead of the lioness
feasting
upon her prey, the scene was eerie and odd below the bridge upon which
we were
parked.
Closest to the bridge on the bank of the mostly dry stream was the
obviously deceased equine. No more than 30 feet away lay what at first
glance looked
to be an equally dead female lion, until we saw that she was resting
and breathing very heavily. In so many words our driver told us that
killing things is hard and sometimes requires a period of recovery
before the buffet can begin
in earnest.
This became even more clear when we looked to the other side of the
bridge and
saw that the lioness had dragged her kill through the sandy river bottom
what easily
amounted to more than 100 yards. Why? That's for the lion to know and
us to find out, and being the morbid types it's our plan to revisit
that bridge and see what's left of that zebra tomorrow.
But for now,
Susan's already sleeping and I'm soon to join her. The only sound
we'll be hearing is the wind and the male lions who are calling
and answering out there somewhere on the plain. That kind of noise
is
easy to fall asleep to.